Scintillating

Research studies serve to validate strategies, treatments and devices to prove they are beneficial to humans. They open the pathway for innovation and an understanding of certain diseases or methods. Yet, even with their continued importance, less Read more...

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What problem does your solution solve?

Research studies serve to validate strategies, treatments and devices to prove they are beneficial to humans. They open the pathway for innovation and an understanding of certain diseases or methods. Yet, even with their continued importance, less than 10% of them end up being published, even after extensive development. Unfortunately, innovation in the methods used to run these studies are obsolete and end up costing trials $600,000–$8 million per day to manage data. Systems often censor data or put it behind a paywall, which stifles innovation, and are fairly expensive to manage, providing no net benefit to all.

Scintillating's flagship product, reBlock, aims to solve the considerable issues in studies today, by using the blockchain to greatly reduce costs and increase transparency between researchers and participants. Using this technology, data collection, maintainability and overall participation in studies can be improved, and thus opens that pathway for research availability.

What’s the market potential for your solution?

The target market is the Clinical Trials Market as well as the General Research market. Our ideal customer would include researchers and professors. The market is growing at a 13.0%. per year CAGR, beginning in 2016 with 2.63 billion in 2016 to $4.29 billion in 2020. Further, the additional market we address, which is electronic data capture and compliance is estimated to touch $4,051.6 million in 2020 or 4 billion additional dollars. The target country is the United States, which includes these statistics, but the market can be expanded worldwide after successful breach.

Who are your customers?

We plan to first appeal to research labs in universities and hospitals, where researchers there can create studies on the platform for our users. Research managers in these institutions can use it to supplement or supplant their existing clinical trial management systems used by the researchers. To attract study participants, we will partner with insurance companies, who already have massive demographic databases of potential patients. In exchange for allowing us to market to their customers, both the companies and the customers get payment from participation in studies, while companies benefit from customers' good health and resultant advancements in the healthcare industry. This is a proven business model as health companies do not have to pay as much in benefits. We are a B2B company as we appeal to the insurance market and the research market through universities or laboratories rather than appealing directly to consumers, but we will have the option for them to use our product.

How will you reach your customers?

For one, we have attended and talked at expos such as the MIT Bitcoin Expo where we won second place and gained publicity. We then were able to talk at Babson College’s Understanding ICOs conference where we were seen as an up and coming blockchain company and got recognition on social media. We will be attending several other notable conferences and aim to appeal to researchers and companies through our active social media presence. We have an active LinkedIn company profile and are in the process of creating an active Twitter. Further, insurance companies fill the role of “resellers” for our business, as they will be able to garner patients in return for monetary benefits. For inbound marketing, we will use SEO and advertisements on LinkedIn and other social media sites; as for outbound, we are attending conferences.

How will you make money?

From each study, we will take a scaling fee based on the number of participants and the amount paid to each. We also take fees to discourage system exploitation; for example, a study creator’s deposit is confiscated and redistributed if they attempt to withhold payment to their participants.

We also offer enterprise solutions.

What kind of partners will you need to make, support and distribute your solution?

We require partnerships with both research institutions and insurance companies or other companies with demographic databases. Further, as a digital-based company, there are no manufacturing or supply-chain economics that warrant partnerships. As such, we will focus on partnerships with researchers and insurance company heads in order to integrate our product. If you know of any such names, please contact us on our website at https://scintillate.me

What will your expenses include?

In order to host a node connecting to the Ethereum blockchain, we require high-powered servers. Furthermore, to store the data of the medical studies, which could reach into the terabytes in size, we will need a reliable storage server. Furthermore, to develop and audit our smart contracts, we will need to pay full-time developer salaries and $20,000-50,000 for a one-time audit by a notable company, which can be reduced drastically. Most of the costs are based on a need for hardware.

Who is your competition and how do you differ?

Many competitors currently exist in the market such as ClinicalTrials, run by the U.S. government, which currently has ~270,000 studies. They largely only handle publishing data after the study is complete, and they do not handle payment or the consent/communication process. Another large competitor goes by the name of Parexel with ~1 million subjects and 26,000 users. Other large names in this field are Oracle Health Services, Edetek, and Phoenix CTMS. Yet all of these fail to utilize the specific technology used in our product. reBlock uses the power of blockchain technology of which, despite strong demand, the only sign that has popped up is a scientific article with CC0 licensed code and several citations, which agree that blockchain can solve several problems in this field. Using the blockchain proves to be a little-used but much more effective in terms of finance, and efficiency.